`30 Days of Night' starts with an admirable idea: How about a vampire story in Northern Alaska during the dead of winter when there is no sunlight for about a month? There's so much you can do with cold and darkness to make a chilling horror adventure, and there have been many movies done recently in this vein, (including `Wind Chill' and `First Snow'). Based on screenwriter Steve Niles' co-authored comic series, the film descends into the darkness, but just like the protagonists who fight the villains off from their Barrow, AK town, they sometimes lose opportunities to be effective.



The story starts just before the winter solstice. In ritual fashion the Barrow citizens see the last sunset they will witness for nearly thirty days. Included in that ritual is the sheriff, Eben (Josh Hartnett) and his separated wife, Stella (Melissa George) who face the demanding winter with routine resignation. Eben stays close to his teenage brother, Jake (Mark Rendall) and grandmother (Elizabeth McRae), while Stella misses a consequential flight back to Anchorage.



Soon after their last sunset, strange occurrences come upon their small town. Lights go out, power is extinguished, and a whole kennel of sled dogs (huskies) is brutally killed. After that more mishaps are presented, including a strange accident between Stella and a man driving heavy machinery. Startlingly, the shrieks of mysterious creatures show up on the scene and attack isolated people. Soon scattered victims are found with elaborate neck wounds at messy crime scenes. From there the sheriff gathers with some people as they lock themselves behind closed doors to wait out the ordeal and flee when they can to a generator plant. Without the respite of a sunrise to help them regroup, they have to resort to other methods once they've decided it is indeed vampires plaguing their town.



One of the great flaws of the film is its diminishing suspense. They give up the ghost early and often. Truly scary for the first 2/5 of the running time, we meet the hideous creatures as they gather together. The vampire parleys have them speaking in their native language, and, while, this works well in 'Star Wars' for fun, here it's almost laughable. Meant to explain their motivations, it doesn't tell us much and has the effect of merely showcasing bad dialogue and making their menace seem silly at times.



There are also other credibility gaps. At one point Eben has a chance to save his town and a woman who's put at risk from the whole throng of vampires. Why doesn't he try to do something to destroy them and save the whole town all at once? My best guess is that because the movie is only slightly more than half over, they have to have Sheriff Eben do something stupid, so we can reach an equally incredulous conclusion.



While all horror pictures shouldn't be the same, I couldn't help but draw comparisons to M. Night Shymalan's `Signs (Vista Series),' which used suspense expertly and only gave us glimpses of the perceived aliens until the end. I also thought of `Insomnia (Full Screen Edition),' a thriller, starring Robin Williams and Al Pacino, where they used sunshine and sleeplessness to better effect than they did with the Alaskan elements here. While I could see that editor, Art Jones, did many admirable things that we've seen in movies like '28 Weeks Later (Full-Screen Version),' his yeoman work only takes us so far. From the jolts of the first half hour, the movie turns from scary and suspenseful to a gruesome and pointless arcade.